January 15th 2018Invitation to Parents and Guardians to Join us on our School Tree-Planting Day in Seagrange Park on Wednesday, January 31stDear Parents and Guardians,While you may know our school has won many green flags, you may not be aware that St. Laurence NS has been a leader in environmental education over many years. In 2017 our school came first in Ireland in the Eco-UNESCO Local to Global competition and we have won Repak and Electricity Association of Ireland national environmental awards as well as many regional awards from organisations such as Irish Aid. For the third year in a row, we are in SEAI's top twenty schools in the country for our Green Flag Tree project. Our Green Committee has represented the school to audiences of up to 600 people (including Government Ministers and Mayors) at the Helix Theatre and the Mansion House.One area in which the children at St. Laurence’s have been especially involved has been in a number of tree-planting initiatives. We planted native tree plantations at the front of our Senior Building in 1999 and our Junior Building in 2015. When we ran out of space on our school grounds we teamed up with 8 other schools and planted 300 trees in Seagrange Park, Baldoyle (adjacent to the Senior Building) at our “Tree Academy” last year.In 2018 we are planning a Tree Planting Day to give all the children in the school an opportunity to plant a tree and in addition will hold a further Tree Academy, which will take place on 7th March. This Tree Planting Day will help towards achieving our sixth International Green Flag, for work on “Global Citizenship, Litter and Waste”. We will work in collaboration with other schools, and hope to plant a total of 3,000 trees this time, one for every primary school in Ireland! The children will plant their trees in Seagrange Park where we hope they will be able to enjoy them for years to come. We are working on this project in partnership with Fingal County Council who will be providing help and trees. Our project will also link with children in over 100 countries around the world as part of a UN-backed project, “Plant-for-the-Planet”.One of the best climate actions a community can take is to plant trees. Trees not only absorb carbon and other harmful gases while releasing oxygen, they provide a whole host of other benefits, including improving ecosystems by creating habitats and food; reducing flooding (a particular problem in this park) and soil erosion; reducing noise and air pollution; enhancing well-being and local scenery and even increasing the value of property.The Tree Planting Day event will take place rain or shine so please ensure that your child on this day hasA rainproof coat A change of footwear, such as wellies/football boots or old runners as there will be mud. Gloves and tools will be provided – but they can bring gardening gloves from home if they wish Please turn over ........... While Fingal Co. Council will have prepared the ground, it can be a bit of work digging the holes especially for the younger children and we would greatly appreciate some adult help on the day. If you were free to join us on Wednesday 31st January during the course of the day for an hour or longer please fill out the form overleaf and return it to your child’s class teacher by Wednesday 17th . Le gach dea guí,

Tick the box(es) when you will be available and you will be emailed with further details.

Newsflash; Didn't we organise this well!School will be closed today 16/10/2017, the first day of the first Climate Action week, due to the oncoming storm. Time to get planting with more vigour!

We look forward to lots of Environmental workshops in the coming weeks to address this global problem!

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Welcome to all visitors to our busy website, especially the pupils in Room 5 and their families who work so hard making our environment a better place. We look forward to continued friendship and new experiences. Ms. Hannan and Ms. Farrell are delighted to see everyone looking so well after their recent break.

We are standing here at our wishing tree, wishing you all a very happy, healthy and successful 2016 and 2017! If you look through our web pages you will see some of the great activities we have got up to recently.

​Our other wish is that every school in Ireland gets to plant a tree this year or next; we are here to help, we will show them how we did it ourselves!​Trees will feature very importantly in our work this year as we work with the green committee on our WildAREness project. Welcome to our First Class pages, St. Laurence NS.Click on "NEW Our Micro Forest blog" for our latest news. We have put all our recent photos over on this Green Schools Blog to tell other schools about our projects; We are home to Plant-for-the-Planet in Ireland. With this and our recent Irish Aid SymmeTREE WildAREness project competition, we are Dublin and North of Ireland region finalists and One Good Idea SEAI top twenty entrants!Our motto is "Safety, Fun and Learning".

Having great fun doing science week experiments; did you know trees could talk? Check out TED.com.We loved Maths week last month too; we took over the whole hall with Maths equipment. Our favourite task? How will we count the million trees we plant?

Here are a few experiments to do at home just for fun....​

Lots of dressing up opportunities!

We had lots of fun putting on our annual show and going to see everyone else's!

Hi everybody!

How is the Operation Birdsong Nation going? I put out some bread heels soaked in water this morning, nobody will eat them and it is such a waste to put them in the brown bin really!

​We look forward to more of all of the above with our not-so-new class anymore of 2016. We hope you and your families had a great break recently and after the rest, let's get cracking!

We have got off to a great start with our almost weekly winning of the GOLDEN BOOT AWARD....well done to all the backup teams getting the children suited and booted each Wednesday morning to walk to school.

We enjoyed our annual cake sale where there were thousands of goodies to admire. Thanks to all who helped to make it such a fun experience.

We are sorry to have finished our soccer training module, we had lots of fun and it makes us well able to cheer for Ireland now we know the rules! Well most of them.

Well done to all who got us the Golden Boot Award so many times last year in a row! TWENTY children in the class walked even a little way to school on Wednesdays during 2014/2015! Wow indeed! Can you top that I asked at the start of the year? Lots of you top bananas can!

We are learning to put together some webpages for our class and our school!There are a few mistakes we know...First Class spotted one the first week we were back! But as Jamie Oliver said about bacon cheese burgers on his programme about Comfort Food, "Perfect is...well...not perfect!". We will get around to fixing the errors when we find the time but by then I suppose we will have made more! In the meantime we are making this little resource to make our lives a little easier!

We are enjoying lots of exciting times together!

We are celebrating diversity! We are starting with ourselves and learning about different cultures! We had the pleasure of a visit from 3 cousins from France in October, Becky's cousin Solene and two other cousins, grown-up young ladies who are friends of ours, Lea and Marine. They told us lots of exciting things about life in France; among other things- being served a three-course lunch in the school restaurant, that would be nice!

We have started learning some little French phrases from our visitors which we hope to practice and we taught them some useful phrases too, with help from two more francophones from our class-next-door! Vive la difference!

Some Practical Notices for Parents and Guardians;

We have an open-door policy; drop in any morning if you have any concerns or want to bring anything to our attention. First Class is a big transition from Infant level. We find the children get pretty tired after the first few weeks with the extra hour.

We are all a pretty happy family but as in all families sometimes there can be differences to resolve. The earlier we know if there is a problem the earlier we can sort it. If you can't make it in put a note in the homework copy or folder.

Homework; We have a little most nights, we find it really helps your child's progress to do a few lines a night...we generally set 3 sentences, 3 little sums along with the wordlist and reader and a run through tables. We are very happy for them to skip a night if they are really tired, if they aren't feeling great or if something special comes up. Just send in a little note please so that we know. Around 20 to 25 minutes is plenty. Many may manage to get it all done in ten or fifteen minutes. It's okay to do some in advance if something is coming up and if it suits, you might be able to catch up on missed work if your child misses out. PE takes place on Tuesdays (G.A.A.), Wednesdays (Basketball) and Fridays (General) . And up to Halloween we will have soccer on Thursdays. Busy, what? Please ensure your child is wearing his/her school tracksuit and runners on these days. We get out most days so watch that your child remembers their coat, it has turned chilly this week and even beautiful mornings can turn wet later in the day.

Art can be messy so thanks to those who have sent in old T-shirts or aprons already. We plan to keep them in school.

Well done to those who have got their names on everything. We put names on anything left nameless we come across to avoid tears...from parents at least.. it rarely bothers the youngsters much if they lose their coats! We have a lost property box in the classroom in case you might need to look in there! Encourage your child to keep their hat down their sleeve for hygiene, it is well worth keeping the hats apart, you might like to tie on their gloves. When you are buying coats and shoes if they cannot tie them perhaps get velcro or poppers or better still teach them how to do it so they can feel independent.

You might spot the class teachers holding your child's bag at home-time. We do this if we have a message for you when we think of it...we have found that while parents can go home without their child...say your child gets a better offer of an exciting place to go in the afternoon...parents almost never go home without the bag!

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